Transport networks are limited resources and bandwidth usage is difficult to predict and manage. Network congestion may occur when more packets or data are transmitted through a network than the network can accommodate. The network typically has a fixed capacity, such as fixed bandwidth or a fixed packet transmission rate. Conventionally, networks experiencing such congestion may simply drop packets. However, dropping packets may have certain drawbacks, such as causing retransmission of the dropped packets, which may further contribute to or prolong the network congestion.
With the deployment of Wi-Fi and 4G radio access networks, the mobile transport network (aka backhaul network) is becoming the bandwidth bottleneck (BB) which is defined as the lowest bandwidth along the complete path between the mobile subscriber and the service endpoint (e.g. the Internet). The bottleneck bandwidth in mobile networks is often located at or near the last hop of the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) eNodeB (eNB) or Wi-Fi Access Point (AP).
Internet traffic is and will continue to be the bulk of the traffic carried over mobile networks. Such traffic is carried over default bearers know as non-Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Tunneling Protocol User (GTP-U) [Ref. 1] tunnels or Wi-Fi Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) [Ref. 2] or Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) [Ref. 3] tunnels usually with a low priority class. Wireless connectivity will soon surpass 300 Mbps, thus making possible for a single subscriber to consume a large portion or all of the transport network resources available between a radio access node and a mobile core network.
Today, when packet loss, delay, or average utilization exceeds a certain threshold, some mobile operators buy more capacity without necessarily attempting to manage the traffic. Other operators prefer to use rate enforcement and limit a number of heavy users at peak times, but they still eventually buy more capacity when utilization rises. In some cases, the backhaul capacity may be over-dimensioned generating a higher cost than necessary for transporting Internet traffic.
Current radio access technologies (Wi-Fi and 4G) do not dynamically account for the available capacity of the mobile transport network and do not know how the available backhaul capacity is shared among users. Thus, there is a general need of a more efficient procedure for managing the network capacity to avoid network congestion.